The Impossible Science : An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology

Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field's diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena.

They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.